Dr. Allison Hatcher, along with her colleagues in the WKU Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD), Drs. Brian Weiler and Lauren Bland, as well as Anchorage School District teacher, Kelly Frost, of Alaska, collaborated for this timely work related to the ways education and healthcare pivoted practice during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. The article, titled, “A Survey of Speech-Language Pathology Graduate Students’ Perceptions of Telepractice Pre- and Post-training During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” was published in Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups.

WKU CSD faculty turned the difficult experience of lockdown into an opportunity to train their summer 2020 graduate clinical students in telehealth practice. Students were surveyed for their level of knowledge and comfort before and after the clinical course. Surveys revealed that students were more comfortable and better prepared for telepractice at the course’s conclusion.

Telepractice has been an emerging area of service in the field of speech-language pathology; however, the COVID-19 pandemic caused many health-related fields to pivot quickly to telehealth and telepractice options. WKU’s CSD faculty found that the experience benefited their graduate students, and now they call for telepractice training to be a requirement for speech-language pathology  graduate education.

Read the full publication here: https://pubs.asha.org/doi/full/10.1044/2021_PERSP-21-00196

Learn more about programs offered in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, including the Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology program at WKU:  https://www.wku.edu/communicationdisorders/